Amazing Swedish History

Viking helmet from a boat grave in Uppland.(Picture from
the-history-notes.blogspot.se)

Amazing Swedish History

Swedish history is full of amazing stories. There’s the king who was killed by a pastry, the man who neutered horses with his teeth, the king who berated Adolf Hitler in his office,… Over the next few weeks, SwedishFreak will tell you everything you need to know about Swedish history, plus a lot of weird stuff that you really don’t need to know, but…

Our Swedish history comes in six parts, covering 1,300 years from about 700 AD until now. The first part, published today, tells why Swedish Vikings went berserk, carved their names with runes in the stone balustrade in the great basilica in Istanbul, founded Russia and brought Christianity to Ukraine.

Check out our history page (Culture/History) which presents each of the six episodes, or dive directly into The Viking Age!

The Author

Thomas

Thomas is a retired IT professional, who lives alone with his golden retriever Ziggy Stardust in a small townhouse in a small town in the southern half of Sweden. He has two grown-up kids and at least five grandkids – "as far as I know".

Thomas enjoys daily long walks with Ziggy in the forests around town, he loves cooking for his guests, and he likes to make things with his hands. He says he loves good food, good wine, people who smile and make him smile.

Having spent most of his life developing things, methods and organizations, he's passionately interested in all kinds of technology, natural science, politics,... anything that raises a problem, whether it can be solved or not. Consequently, he is consistently short of time.

While he was professionally active, he lived in San Francisco a few years, working as software engineer down in Silicon Valley. He claims that he did leave his heart in San Francisco, and is constantly planning to go back and pick it up. Quoting Hoagy Carmichael's Hong Kong Blues, he says "... every time I try to leave, sweet opium won't let me fly away... ...i.e. my opium is Sweden, my kids, my dog, my friends, my forest,... you know, I'm Swedish."